From time to time during our winter monastic retreat, as in most of the retreats I teach for the general public, I hold Qi Gong sessions, for up to an hour. I don’t really think of myself as a Qi Gong teacher, because I have no diploma, and I haven’t been through a course at an accredited school. However I have been shown and instructed in Qi Gong by a few teachers, I’ve absorbed some books, and so I demonstrate what I do. And, realizing that I’ve been practising Qi Gong for twenty years, I reckon it’s time to come out.
The initial condition
for picking up Qi Gong was a teacher and friend of the
monastery. He lived a few miles away, but offered
to cycle in on weekdays
for our pre-dawn meditation session (amazing friends we have…)
to take us through some moves.
He thought it would help our energy. He made this wonderful offering
for, I think, one or two months. So he’d
sit with us in meditation for forty-five minutes, then we’d
have a half-hour of Qi Gong, and then return to meditation for another fifteen
minutes or so. The Qi Gong we did was a simple form of eight moves (‘The
Silk Brocade’) followed by a still standing form called ‘Standing
Like A Tree’. The moves felt like nothing special, but the standing, for
up to ten minutes with the arms held in one position, was quite taxing. Yet the
results were a sense of bodily ease, and of ‘being held’ that made the
mind feel calm and grounded. Energy felt balanced. It was a good way to come
out of meditation: it
firmed up the centredness of being
in the body as the sense-doors opened and the world came flooding in. And after a while it also felt
like a good way to enter meditation; it provided a
strong connection to the body that helped to draw the mind away from thinking.
I have practised
hatha yoga since my late teens; in fact the shifts that that brought about were
what initiated me into a spiritual path and meditation. The realization was
that being in the body changes the mind in terms of increased calm and depth. However, a life in robes, sans
spandex, has kept my yoga routine down to a minimal fifteen to twenty minutes,
often at the end of a day. Then there was also pranayama, the yoga of
breathing. I was introduced to this at the age of ten by the teacher of my
Physics class at school who was obviously as bored as we were with trying to
inculcate the wonders of Boyle’s Law to a group
of restless boys. Although I never took to pranayāma in a committed way, the calming and
enriching effect of breath-work did register. But maybe pranayāma
was a bit too full-on. Qi Gong was
more portable than yoga āsanas, and at least at the level I was
doing it, less demanding. Even fifteen minutes of standing around doing nothing
much was adequate. And
although it seemingly had nothing to do with breathing, when I sat down at the end of a
half-hour session, the breathing came to the fore unprompted. It was a fuller kind of breathing: the experience was one of a
steady energy tide that was associated with breathing, but wasn’t a matter of sensations – either that
of the air brushing the nostrils, or of the push and pull of the diaphragm. It
was a quiet steady energy that felt like it was
breathing me. This 'Qi’ energy wrapped
gently and firmly around the mind and smoothed it out. Moreover as Qi, the breathing remained evident
even when the sensations of breathing faded away (as they tend to when the mind
calms down).
I reckoned that the Buddha, the embodied spiritual voyager par
excellence, surely must have experienced this. But where did he mention it?
Looking through the Ānāpānasati sutta (M119), I paused
over the term ‘bodily formation’ (kāyasankhāra).
I always wondered what that meant. It is explained as ‘kāyasankhāra
is in- and out-breathing' (M.44.14)
– but
that doesn't go far: what aspect of breathing? Air? Sensation? Or what?
Sankhāra, one of the puzzle words of the
Canon, crops up in many places, and is of crucial significance. As in the
Buddha’s
last words: ‘All sankhārā are
impermanent, strive on with diligence’.
And even more directly: ‘He
turns his mind away from those states, and directs it towards the deathless
element thus: “This is the peaceful, this is the
sublime, that is, the stilling of all sankhārā,
the relinquishment of all attachments, the destruction of craving, dispassion,
cessation, Nibbana.”’ (M.64.9) Sankhāra
is often translated as ‘formation’ or ‘fabrication’; but if sankhārā are
‘stilled’, they must be energetic. So how about
rendering kāyasankhāra as ‘bodily
energy’? In terms of direct experience that fits. The ‘bodily formation’
then is that bodily
sense that one has when the eyes
are closed and one isn’t focusing on
external touch; it’s the internal sense that gives the impression of being in
the body. Yes, that ‘forming’ is
an ongoing activity (another way of rendering ‘sankhāra'); it is a process whereby
moment by moment, and centred on breathing, the body comes into awareness. Its energy is constantly
fluctuating. And when
you tune into it, it’s pleasant, and supports the ease and joy of absorption
because it also regulates the mind’s
energy. This bodily formation smoothes and
brightens the mind
through the bog of the hindrances. And as concentration
deepens, you can
feel that bodily formation change shape and
texture. The body gets to feel light and like plasma, and of one texture rather
than broken up into sections and twinges.
The Asian traditions have always understood breath to be much
more than a respiratory matter: ‘prana’ - which must be some
Sanskrit form of the ‘pāna’ of ānāpānasati - is the life-force which can be steered
up the spine and through the entire body. So is Qi. In
a similar vein, the Buddha describes the air element as ‘passing through
the limbs’, something that
respiration doesn’t do. So to the
Buddha, breath is not just a lung and nose thing. And although my scholarship is
rudimentary, experience affirms
that. As the Ānāpānāsati
sutta has it: ‘Thoroughly sensitive to the entire
body, one breathes in and breathes out.’ Yes. ‘Calming the ‘bodily
formation one breathes in and breathes out.’ Yes.
Moreover, holding ‘energy’ as one aspect of what is meant by sankhāra also opens up a few other areas. If sankhāra entails energy, then ceasing
isn’t annihilation of a thing, but the
turning down of energy to a rest state. That makes nibbāna a little more
accessible (at least conceptually). Just noticing that, as the body and mental energies
quieten, the sense of wordless
clarity and presence increases: that makes it more likely that nibbāna
is a wiping clean, a voiding of differentiation, not a wipe-out of presence.
And on a more rudimentary
level, having a source of subtle and sustaining pleasure that is
associated with calm and introspection helps
to steer the mind away from external delights.
Another radical effect of Qi Gong has been in terms of my bodily
structure. Before I started practising it, I had been experiencing problems
with my back for more than a decade. It grew painful after about half an hour
of sitting. From time to time, it would go out, seize up and make movement
painful to the point when I’d be laid up for
a few days and have to undertake a few visits to an osteopath to get the
vertebrae reset. I had taken to sitting in a frame, basically a chair with the
arms and legs cut off, to
give support. My standing posture was sway-backed, leaning back from the hips.
Standing Like A Tree steadily realigned all that. The ‘empty’ position of
Standing, which is the central and abiding reference for all the Qi Gong that I
did, means standing with the buttocks relaxed, the tail turned under, and the knees
very slightly flexed and positioned over the centre of the feet, which are held in parallel. It felt
odd and unbalanced (my body had
learnt the unbalanced posture as the norm). It meant widening attention over
the feet and (for me) inclining back towards the heels; then relaxing the lower
belly as if about to sit down, and simply standing, bringing the arms slightly
away from the sides of the body ‘enough to hold a blackbird’s egg in each armpit’ as my teacher put
it. This posture steadily rearranged the structural muscles in my back. As I’ve subsequently explored, in this
position, the long muscles that run up the back between the pelvis and the ribs
on either side of the spine get gently activated. It’s a strange business for the muscles, because they
are emphatically not active, but ‘activated’ – that is, energy runs through them. I think it’s because while the muscles have to be relaxed,
the positions cause the
tendons and the connective tissues to do some work. And whereas muscles contract
and tighten when they work, tendons slowly lengthen. This generates energy, or allows it to move
through the muscles (which have to be relaxed in order to allow that to
happen). In this way, the body can release it's cramps and malalignments. The musculature self-adjusts.
The first of the Standing Like A Tree positions entails drawing the arms around to
sustain a position in front of the body with the hands open and the palms
facing your abdomen. The sense is
as if you are holding, or being held by, a large inflatable ball in the ocean.
You just hang there, letting the ball hold you up; relaxing the shoulders and
arm muscles – for three minutes…five minutes…ten minutes – progressively,
over a month or so. That
progressive sense allows the connective tissues to slowly stretch and strengthen. And as they do so, energy runs through them (as
the air element through the limbs) and fills the entire bodily formation. After
a while, it feels like ‘it’ – the ball,
the Qi – is holding you. Even when you relax the posture, the arms still hang there for a while as if they remember the
ball. Suffice it to say
that I now sit for hours in lotus with no support; and I teach standing
meditation.
‘It is holding you.’ Psychologically, that’s quite a statement. How much time,
energy and willpower does it take to get hold of a meditation object? Trying to keep hold of the
breath can be a frustrating business; and even when it succeeds, it can give
rise to the attitude of being the controller, on guard against distracting
influences. For the average person this adds stress to the already existing
stress – and the best achievement seems to be one of perching
at the top of a slippery pole for a while. Isn’t
that the life story of the ‘successful’ person? The wiser approach, which meditation
masters accomplish, is
to be held by the meditation object and let go of the controller. But to get to
that point takes some doing. It amounts to a breakthrough in attitude, approach
and practice to turn to the body’s own energy formations to do that.
Maybe this is why the Buddha taught mindfulness of breathing – it
can attune us to an intelligence that can oversee body and mind.
Body has intelligence, and gets educated rightly, wrongly and
sometimes in patchy ways. Mindfulness of breathing is one way whereby that
intelligence is accessed and clarified. As far as that goes, Qi Gong is just a
method of entry, but a useful one as much of the problem with ānāpānasati
is because people’s bodies are so energetically
unbalanced that their minds
have to try to do what a balanced body will do for them. Modern life is
backless (use a chair) legless (use wheels) and segmented (we live in the upper ten percent of our bodies most of the
time). Most people don’t experience a
whole balanced body. The body
that they experience is formed day after day by the impact of images from screens or
the shock effect of stress. That
needs to be addressed and undone, and I don't think you can do that through the mind, the
will or devotion.
Also there are developmental
issues in how the body grows
that have their effects. Recently I came across ‘Bodydynamics’(http://www.bodynamicusa.com)
– a system based on the
work of Lisbeth Marcher. Over years of experience working with people with
trauma, Lisbeth developed
a map of how various muscles learn (or don’t
learn) to support psychological functions, and she developed a way of healing. So I investigated how Standing Like A Tree
fitted in with that. The
results were affirmative. Obviously the Qi Gong posture energizes ankles and
legs in a way that is associated with the ability to meet the world and yet
stand one's own ground. The extended arm positions energize muscles that are to
do with both holding one 's personal boundaries, and allowing oneself to be supported
by others. (As opposed to being impacted by the world, reaching out into it or
defending oneself against it.) That's a significant shift: it brings around the
sense of 'being supported'. But there were also surprising details, such as
that the muscles of the inner thighs are to do with containment (the
ability to encompass a wide range of emotional and psychological impact) and collecting oneself. Those muscles, rarely
used in conventional methods of walking and standing, are specifically
energized by the slight straddle that standing with the knees positioned over
the centre (rather than the inner edge) of the feet.
I may sound like a Qi Gong fanatic, but actually outside of retreats and teaching others, I
might do only about
fifteen minutes on the occasional day – much less time than I spend in
chanting, and a tiny percentage of the time that I put into mindfulness of breathing. One can do a lot with Qi Gong as a
martial art, but that's not my aim. Apart from the physical realignment (the
spine is still damaged, but amazingly causes no pain), the insight that 'it
comes to you, let it support you' is the major way in which Qi Gong has
integrated into my meditation. Developing a practice around that is quite an
awakening, and fine
work too. Just as standing
fully entails doing what it takes to connect to the planet that
supports us, breathing mindfully connects to the support of Dhamma. Knowing that in one's body and heart is well worth growing some roots for!
